Well, I would totally disagree. I love safe and transparent but it is just not what gets the job done. I've had to transfer money to people around the world and people have asked to send them dollar-pegged tokens on networks like Tron and Polygon. These are not ideologically sexy networks at all but they have clearly found product-market fit. Metamask (convenience) + low fees + fiat peg (less volatility and easier to understand) and people are all about it. And, whether we like it or not, it works.

Meanwhile I've had the majority of my net worth on Ethereum for over 5 years now and am not really worried about it. And I get user experience that I can never get with bitcoin, like social recovery smart contract wallets.

And taproot is two years old.

Safe? Tacking on higher energy-costs through more complexity and increasing pollution across the planet as a result of the increased energy expenditure is safe innovation?

Distributed permissionless databases of any sort are a bust and a scam, period. This was tested and found true in the 70s.